Posted
by
justin++on Tuesday August 10, 1999 @07:30AM
from the just-a-proposal dept.

EngrBohn writes "The August issue of IEEE Spectrum mentions a proposal by the International Electrotechnical Commission to introduce new prefixes for words that indicate powers-of-two (page 18 of the print issue). This would replace kilobytes (kB) with kibibytes (KiB), megabytes (MB) with mebibytes (MiB), gigabytes (gB) with gibibytes (GiB), and so on. The rationale is two-fold. First is to restore the integrity of the SI prefixes to meaning powers-of-ten. Second is to eliminate ambiguity over whether, for example, a megabyte is 10**6 bytes or 2**20 bytes. Think this is a non-issue? I noticed this morning that Iomega's 100MB Zip disks have a 10**8 byte capacity, and Maxtor also considers a megabyte to be 10**6 bytes. "